Senior Backend Engineer, Database Excellence (Ruby)

Overview

In this Senior Backend Engineer role, you will advance GitLab’s data frameworks to keep application datastores scalable, healthy, and safe across GitLab.com and self-managed instances. You’ll build retention and lifecycle management and enforce policies at schema-change time, guiding teams on data architecture and lifecycle decisions. The role blends hands-on PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails work with cross-functional collaboration to improve performance and scalability. This position offers remote, agile collaboration and a chance to shape data health features for a broad user base.

Pay / Benefits

• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave

Responsibilities

• Develop backend features and data frameworks to enable scalable data handling across SaaS and self-managed deployments
• Design and implement data retention and lifecycle management frameworks, including retention enforcement and bulk data removal tooling
• Build guardrails at schema-change time to prevent unsustainable data growth before production
• Collaborate with product management, UX, frontend, infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics to ship high-performing solutions
• Review database-related changes for data integrity, safety, and performance across deployment scenarios
• Create tooling such as SQL traffic replay and background operations frameworks to address scalability and performance issues
• Research and implement improvements in data retention, database performance, scalability, and data health (e.g., soft delete strategies, migration testing)
• Document database best practices and architecture guidance for developers
• Develop proactive tooling and guardrails to detect and remediate potential issues early in the lifecycle
• Shape scalability and data health features for self-managed customers as part of the Data Engineering organization

Key requirements

• Professional software engineering experience with PostgreSQL in large production environments
• Proficiency with Ruby on Rails or another Ruby framework; backend design and review experience
• Ability to reason about software design, algorithms, and system-level performance trade-offs
• Strong written communication and comfort working asynchronously in a distributed team
• Self-directed work style with strong prioritization
• Alignment with GitLab values (transparency, collaboration, inclusion, open source)
• Willingness to participate in tier 2 database on-call rotation
• Openness to learning new tools and approaches and transferable experience from related domains

• Strong written communication
• Comfort working asynchronously in a distributed team
• Self-directed and organized
• PostgreSQL in large production environments
• Ruby on Rails or similar Ruby framework
• Backend design and performance trade-offs

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